In my acer aspire laptop I got windows 7 os. I decided to install also gentoo, but I believe that I deleted the disk space with windows because the whole amount of disk was partitioned wirh fdisk. I created anyway a free partition in gentoo. I have a rescue cd from my previous windows os and a back up of the system. Is it possible to restore windows for a dual boot?

Windows 7 may use GPT, which means you need to use parted, or something that understands GPT disk labels.
fdisk will give you a warning about it but not stop you trashing your data if GPT was in use and you ignored the warning.

Windows Rescue CDs come in assorted flavours. The most common will only reimage your HDD as it was when your PC was new. These cannot be used to install Windows alongside other things. They just wipe your drive. The rarer sort are real Windows installers, where you get a degree of control over the install.
The will still install the Windows boot loader, so you have to reinstall Grub, unless you install Windows first._________________Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

In my acer aspire laptop I got windows 7 os. I decided to install also gentoo, but I believe that I deleted the disk space with windows because the whole amount of disk was partitioned wirh fdisk. I created anyway a free partition in gentoo. I have a rescue cd from my previous windows os and a back up of the system. Is it possible to restore windows for a dual boot?

It depends on what this resque CD contains. Will the partitions layout be restored by this CD or not? If yes, you will get your windows back and you can try install gentoo again, this time more carefully.

P.S.
Any way the first thing you should to do is booting with liveCD/USB and checking: is your windows installation exists or gone?

Last edited by creaker on Thu May 30, 2013 5:19 pm; edited 1 time in total

In my acer aspire laptop I got windows 7 os. I decided to install also gentoo, but I believe that I deleted the disk space with windows because the whole amount of disk was partitioned wirh fdisk. I created anyway a free partition in gentoo. I have a rescue cd from my previous windows os and a back up of the system. Is it possible to restore windows for a dual boot?

It depends on what this resque CD contains. Will the partitions layout be restored by this CD or not? If yes, you will get your windows back and you can try install gentoo again, this time more carefully.

P.S.
Any way the first thing you should to do is booting with liveCD/USB and checking: is your windows installation exists or gone?

I would try to restore the system with this resque CD. May be you will be lucky, anyway you have nothing to loose since your windows gone.
Also usually Acer has a hidden recovery partition. Did you checked about this partition existence?

Please boot with linux and put your dmesg on a pastebin site.
Some vendors hide things in whats called the Host Protected Area.

Essentially, the HDD is set up to lie about its real size. The space between the reported size and real size is called the Host Protected Area.
Its only accessible to the operating system by removing the HPA.

Some vendors just used hidden partitions, which fdisk and friends allow you to delete._________________Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

I have installed windows 7 and gentoo on the same machine. Windows partition is dev/sda1, gentoo boot is on / dev/sda2, swap on sda3 and root on / dev/sda4. I use grub for dual booting. Windows goes fine. Gentoo boots only with genkernel and initramfs generated by genkernel all. Without iniramfs kernel-genkernel does not boot (cannot open root device sda4 or unknown block (0,0): error -6...kernel panic). I am trying to configure my own kernel because for the time being cannot get any wireless extension by iwconfig. My new kernel (with initramfs line in grub) stops when determining the root device...Block device dev/sda4 is not a valid root device...Could not find the root block device in. Specify another value etc etc. The grub.conf section for my new kernel is the same as the one that loads, except tor the kernel image, that slightly changed for getting wireless access. What is happening???

genkernel creates many modules including for file systems and disk drivers
the modules must be loaded before the kernel can use the disk drivers and file systems to load and start the system
the initramfs loads those drivers
http://kernel-seeds.org/ even more than the handbook is the kernel builders bible
you can use genkernel --menuconfig all as an intermediate kernel editor while working on your wireless._________________Defund the FCC.